My Story
I have died twice.
The first death had a name. A rock bottom. A community of people who understood exactly what I was laying down.
The second one was quiet.
I didn’t see it coming. No rock bottom moment. No intervention. No chip to mark the date. Just a slow, steady stripping of everything I thought defined me, and a God who was already waiting on the other side of it.
But before I get to the second death, you need to know how I got here.
I was raised without God. No church growing up. No prayers at dinner. No language for anything beyond what you could see and touch.
I was seventeen when strangers came to my house in the dark and kidnapped me with my parents’ blessing. I was sent to Jamaica. Not sandy beaches and good food. One of those Troubled Teen Industry institutions. The kind that left marks you couldn’t explain when you came home, to people who couldn’t understand what you’d been through.
I came back more broken than I left. More alien. More certain I didn’t belong anywhere.
The using made sense after that. It was the only thing that did.
I got clean at 22 in 2003. Eighteen months later, my younger brother died. He was twenty. I knew God was the only reason I wasn’t self-medicating to survive the worst grief of my life. And I cursed Him in the same breath.
Why him. Why not me.
That dichotomy followed me for a decade.
I prayed to the universe, to energy, the moon, nature. Nothing quite landed. But it worked. A god of my choosing was enough. I didn’t hang out with Christians. When I heard the name Jesus, I had a visceral reaction.
Then 2020 came and the world shut down.
The darkness wasn’t new. I’d lived in it. But 2020 showed me it had a name. That true evil exists. And if that was real, then light had to be real too.
That was the moment.
One verse kept appearing everywhere I looked. Ephesians 6. The Armor of God. It occupied space in my mind until I finally surrendered to it.
I stepped into something unfamiliar. I had never opened a Bible.
I was becoming the person I never thought I’d be. The one who took His name in vain. The one who wanted nothing to do with Christians. The one who thought the Bible was fables.
And I knew I was home.
For seventeen years a Higher Power kept me standing. But there came a point where a Higher Power wasn’t enough.
When He finally had a name, everything changed.
Spring of 2025. A moment I didn’t see coming. A cartoon depiction of Jesus hanging on the cross. And I broke. I hadn’t grasped grace until that moment.
What followed was a stripping I didn’t see coming and couldn’t have planned.
Reality TV gone. The music changed. Hearing His name used carelessly makes me flinch now. Profanity that never bothered me no longer feels like mine.
The hot yoga I had shown up for fifteen years. Gone after one gut punch from the Holy Spirit I couldn’t explain. I never went back.
The two women I call my pillars, the ones quietly leading me toward the Lord, both announced they were moving out of state. At the same time.
And through all of it I was still in hiding. My husband didn’t know what I was turning into.
From punk rock to worship. Who am I.
A mid-life mom having an identity crisis I didn’t know how to explain, carrying all of it alone, until I couldn’t anymore.
I got on my knees. I surrendered.
In that quiet, I felt Him. I wasn’t craving distraction. I was craving His presence.
And He was already there.
Then the final identity was removed without warning March ‘26.
Ten years of a career. Gone. Not surrendered on my terms. Taken.
The woman who began this journey would have been destroyed by that. But I am not that woman anymore.
The loss still claws at you. The grief is real. The wrestle between flesh and spirit is daily. Some days it feels like flesh is winning.
And then something happens. I feel Him. The anxiety lifts. The fear quiets.
One of the most painful and beautiful processes I have ever been through. And I am still inside it.
I lost friends. I lost my career. Everything in my life now revolves around Jesus. I am bound to a life that until five years ago didn’t include Him in any part of it.
Nobody hands you a chip for that kind of dying.
I didn’t have a name for what was happening to me. Didn’t know what to search for. Didn’t know who to point to and say — that, that’s what’s happening to me.
But surely there were others. Feeling exactly this. Not knowing what to call it either.
That’s why Holy Grit exists.
I am not the person I was when this process started.
What I have is twenty-two years of grit, five years of a faith that has wrecked and remade me, and a certainty I can’t explain: no one is too lost to be saved.
I don’t have an ending to offer you because I’m not at the end. We live in chapters. And there are ones still being written. What I know is that every bend leads somewhere you don’t see coming. Every darkness. Something is waiting around the corner.
The first principle I held onto in recovery was hope. I didn’t have it when I was living my worst. But as long as a shred remains there is room to breathe. Room to persevere. That’s the grit.
That hope has turned to faith.
- Daniela
